Abstract This paper reframes how we talk about invasive species, assisted colonization, thawed “archive” lineages, and biological control by treating fitness peaks as things that can move between landscapes rather than just as points populations climb toward. I introduce the idea of a peak-transplant: cases where a lineage or small community that has already evolved near a local optimum in one setting is moved into a different “hospitability” landscape and arrives as a pre-formed, high-fitness configuration rather than a blank starter population. I then define peak-cluster transplants, where multiple high-fitness species are introduced into the same system, and diagnose the peak-cancellation fallacy: the recurring assumption that adding a “good” peak (such as a biocontrol agent) will neatly cancel a “bad” one (such as a pest), leaving the rest of the system intact. Bringing together work on adaptive landscapes, niche construction, ecological fitting, invasion biology, and classical biological control, the paper uses the language of peak-transplants and peak-cluster transplants to show why species introductions are rarely simple or local in their effects. It also develops a semiotic reading of peaks, treating them as compressed representations of how lineages “read” and modify their environments, so that moving species becomes a matter of moving interpretive systems as well as biomass. The conclusion draws out implications for ecological risk assessment and management, arguing that interventions should be designed with an explicit awareness that each introduced species is a new optimizer reshaping the landscape, not an algebraic term that erases a prior mistake. In collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking The new publication date and version is simply because this paper is now a PDF, to comply with SSRN.
Mark David Warner Scott Williamson (Wed,) studied this question.